


In a Vision, or in None

by charmquark



Series: Edgar Allan Poe challenge [2]
Category: Naruto.
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-17 11:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2307449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmquark/pseuds/charmquark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi has learned that grief breaks people in different ways, and the way they put themselves back together isn't always healthy. (And your illusions can be used against you.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Vision, or in None

**Author's Note:**

> (Written 01/2011) WARNING: mention of sex between a minor (16) and an adult.
> 
> Written for [](http://kakasaku.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://kakasaku.livejournal.com/)**kakasaku** 's Edgar Allen Poe contest, week 2 - "A Dream Within a Dream." Apparently abusing Kakashi is becoming a theme in these things...

By the time he arrived at the Valley of the End, Naruto was already cold to the touch.

Kakashi had seen many dead bodies in his life. The first was his father, curled around the tanto and his own hand, both of which were responsible, method and motive there on the floor along with all the blood in Sakumo’s body. At least, that’s what Kakashi had thought at the time: he’d been a mere child then. He’d never needed the sharingan to sear the image to the back of his skull, like spots on his retinas from staring at the sun too long.

Nor had he needed it to remember Obito, broken Obito, who gave him the Uchiha legacy to carry.

—  _Their legacy?_ He’d always thought of it as his friend’s.

He did, however, have that bequest to give him photographic memory of many of the others, comrades at his side and enemies who died on his own hand. He didn’t think he’d needed it to remember this one, this third and fourth failure, but it was there.

“Sasuke’s,” Pakkun pronounced of the slashed hitai-ate on the ground, not that Kakashi couldn’t have guessed. Naruto was — the crime was his too.

Of all the things Kakashi had seen, all the violence and gore, beheadings and gut wounds and slow deaths and torture — war is cruel and makes men cruel — there was nothing quite so disturbing to him, still, as a corpse’s dead eyes. Nothing was so unsettling, and this was truer of Naruto, whose eyes in life were like the sky in a storm, dark blue and chaotic and active and now they were still, quiet. They reflected, and no longer saw.

Rigor had set in. Minato’s son was still stiff when Kakashi carried him back to Konoha, and he was still stiff in the morgue when Kakashi stood in the Hokage office and told a wide-eyed Sakura that he was dead, and Sasuke was gone.

Tsunade should have been the one to tell her — that was the Hokage’s burden, the office’s duty — but Kakashi felt he should. He felt that if anyone was going to tell her that he had lied to her on top of the hospital, it should be him.

She didn’t believe it at first. Naruto couldn’t be dead, and Sasuke couldn’t have done it. He couldn’t be so far gone as that, so out of reach in every way.

She cried at the funeral. Kakashi couldn’t say whether she did it for one or both of them, or even for herself. It was okay if she was. It was okay to be selfish, because sometimes that was the only way to pick the pieces of herself back up again.

It was difficult, after, to watch her try to fit herself back together. He wondered whether she had it worse, or he did: he hadn’t lost both of his teammates at once, but she hadn’t been responsible for the loss of either. Though it was entirely possible she blamed herself for not being able to stop Sasuke one dark night, regretted that she’d told him she loved him instead of screaming.

_Did she do that?_

He watched her fail to fit with team after team, watched her wander around Konoha without purpose when she was off-duty, watched her wilt like a plant without sunlight or like one uprooted from the safety and nutrition of earth. Her childhood left her first in her grief, and Kakashi could do nothing but be a spectator as other things fell away. The life left Sakura’s eyes day by day.

Failure number five.

He was losing her too, he realized. Everything he cared about, everyone he had ever had a responsibility and a duty to was slipping through his hands as fluidly as sand, as inevitable as tides.

So he lost himself, in alcohol and in women. Women he remembered being very beautiful but could never remember in detail that wasn't murky at best, because he was grieving too and he never opened the sharingan when he was with them and because — 

_— has Sasuke ever seen a naked woman in his life?_

… Ah.

The Mangekyo sharingan is a potent thing. Kakashi has to admit, this kind of torture (of uselessness, of failure and the quiet kind of catastrophes more devastating than bombs to the ones involved) is far more effective than crucifixion and a hundred swords. Underneath the underneath. In some ways, he had taught Sasuke well.

But he had also _taught_ Sasuke, and knows his weaknesses as well as his habits; so, as he used to put his hand over Sasuke’s to correct and perfect his shuriken technique, he takes the illusion down a somewhat different path.

Sakura is older now, and the light of her chakra illuminates her leaf-colored eyes and soothes the migraine that is cleaving his brain right behind his own.

“I wish you’d be more sparing in your use of the sharingan,” she is lecturing. “It gets worse every time.”

“Maa, but then what excuse would you have to come see your old teacher?”

“This isn’t _funny,_ Kakashi.” The headache is gone, her hand has dropped away, and her glare is so reproachful and serious that he figures perhaps a little less humor and a little more sobriety would better suit this conversation. In the interests of not getting hit and inviting that headache back, of course.

“Sakura.”

She is not to be put off, however. “You’re all I have left.” Sakura says it like an indictment. “Naruto’s dead, and I gave up on bringing Sasuke back years ago. You’re the only one I can still _fix,_ so if you could maybe see fit to —"

“—  _Sakura._ ”

“— stop trying to go _blind_ , you asshole, I would — !”

Exactly what Sakura would do, she never finishes saying, because Kakashi’s hand is heavy on the back of her neck and she stutters into silence. That quiet stretches out through his kitchen as they do nothing more or less complicated than look at each other.

What she sees, he can’t say. What _he_ sees are all the things he shouldn’t, but isn’t surprised by. Her eyes are far too heavy, far too old for a sixteen-year-old girl, if that sixteen-year-old is a civilian. Their age is only somewhat too old for a kunoichi who grew up in peace-time; not old at all compared to those he’d seen during the war, like Rin’s.

Is it Rin’s misplaced love he sees in Sakura? Is that what he reaches for? Is that what prompts him to pull her forward and drink it from her mouth, find it intoxicating even though he shouldn’t, just like he shouldn’t have gotten drunk on any of the ones before this?

Kakashi has a strong suspicion that it is that love doubly misapplied — first to Sasuke, now to him — that prompts her to give it desperately and to crawl into his lap and straddle him with her knees to do it more comfortably. He doesn’t complain. He shouldn’t take pleasure from it, but hell, he _does,_ just as he relishes her small breasts and the way her teeth pull his lip and how she looks naked with her back arched.

He shouldn’t take so much satisfaction from these things, but they are branded in his mind anyway. People take solace in all the wrong things and in all the wrong people when they have nothing left — 

The illusion breaks so abruptly Kakashi stumbles and gasps for air. Coming out of a genjutsu is dangerous, every time; the smart thing to do is to get away until he’s oriented himself again, but his legs and gravity have other plans. Tsukiyomi has turned them against him. In hindsight, splitting up from Sakura and Naruto and the rest of Team Seven alone had been a very stupid idea.

When he looks up, Sasuke looks so furious it is almost familiar, like the time he’d been bound and shrieking impotently while Kakashi watched impassively. “That’s _sick,_ ” he hisses, positively vibrating in anger.

Now, like then, Kakashi is unmoved. “You deserved that.”


End file.
